Law students working to improve the system — from the folks at Building a Better Legal Profession trying to improve the profession to the journal folks trying to redefine legal scholarship online with the Legal Workshop site — are inspiring.  And, here is another amazing feat: Robb, a law student at Lewis & Clark Law School has created a pretty amazing and FREE web site for statutory research in Oregon.

When you visit the site for OregonLaws.org, you are immediately struck by the simple, but well-thought out features:

-easy-to-read, indented statutory provisions

-big picture browsing of the titles and volumes

-official annotations appear on the side of relevant statutory language

-source/citation provided for all provisions

-[there is a 'talk to a robot' feature which sounds nifty, but I'm far more interested in the other features]

And, what is more, you can follow the latest enhancements by subscribing to the OregonLaws blog or follow it on Twitter.

Why did Robb create this site?  He writes on his site that he developed this site because he wanted to:

“Increase access to the legal system by lowering the cost of legal research,
Create new ways to browse and learn the law,
Develop an open platform for others to build upon,
Provide a basis for computer-assisted academic research and analysis of statutes.”

Bravo! We’ll share this with our students in Advanced Legal Research.

[Hat tip to Carl Malamud and his tweets on this topic!]